In director Sam Raimi’s latest film, Send Help, the meek shall inherit the Earth, or at the very least they’ll end up with a job that values their hard work and intelligence. Although it takes a roundabout and not always emotionally logical way of arriving at its destination, Send Help is a fun, nasty, and rousing bit of wish fulfilment for anyone who has felt picked on or bullied in the workplace by an idiotic boss. If you don’t think too hard about what Send Help is trying to say about its diametrically opposed lead characters, it’s a gleefully bloody and bruising thrill ride with lots of dark humour and two actors who play brilliantly off one another.
Poor Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) has come up short again at work. After the CEO of the consulting firm she has toiled at for years passes away and his doofus son, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), takes the reigns, the new boss reneges on dad’s promise of giving her a position as Vice President, installing an unqualified fellow frat brother (Xavier Samuel) instead. Bradley doesn’t hold back when Linda asks why she’s been passed over, telling her that she has no charm and that the job requires more than number crunching acumen. (He also finds her physically repulsive and socially awkward, but he tries to sound a tad more professional and a lot more disingenuous when conveying those feelings.) But before he can let Linda go for good, he needs her to travel with the rest of his newfound boys club to Bangkok to close a major merger.
On the plane, Linda almost reaches a breaking point with Bradley and her co-workers’ ridicule, but before anything can be done about it, the plane loses control and crashes into the ocean. Linda and Bradley wash up on the shore of a secluded island. She’s more or less fine, but his leg is in pretty bad shape. Although Linda gathers water and food and makes a shelter for the immobile Bradley, the petulant man-child thinks he can still boss her around. But Linda has an ace up her sleeve that makes her a necessary asset. She has spent most of her free time (at home with her pet bird) boning up on her survival and wilderness skills with hopes of landing a spot on TV’s Survivor. Bradley and his soft, never-worked-a-real-day-in-his-life hands are effectively useless, and Linda is in almost total control. She tries her best to keep someone who make her life a living hell alive, but it isn’t always easy. And even when Bradley starts to trust Linda a bit more during their ordeal, he still suspects there’s something off about her. Bradley wants to get off the island ASAP. Linda, on the other hand, has found a place where she can thrive. She glows up. He looks like a bruised turd.
The early stages of Send Help, before they even get to the island, are framed by Raimi almost like the viewer is watching a Batman villain origin story unfolding. As Linda (dressed in the frumpiest sweaters this side of frump-town) is constantly made the butt of jokes, ignored, cut-off while speaking, and generally looked down upon, the viewer waits for the moment when she finally snaps and proves her worth in ruthless, unambiguous terms. The concept from writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason, the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot, Baywatch) seems tailor made to fit the kind of horrific sensibilities Raimi dabbled in earlier in his career, before he became a sought after director of comic book and IP blockbusters. On paper and once the story shifts to the island, Send Help becomes a cartoonish bit of survival horror in the vein of a classic Tales from the Crypt episode, where an irredeemable silver spoon goon gets put through the paces and has to atone for their sexist, inequitable ways in uncomfortably painful fashion. The joke is to laugh at this contemptible person’s misfortune and have it serve as a cautionary tale.
And for about the first half of Send Help and in key moments of the back end, the story functions nicely in that respect. Raimi isn’t afraid of employing nightmarish visions, painful looking injuries, and the occasional burst of gore to get his point across about the direness of Linda and Bradley’s situation. At one point, he even employs the famed “Raimi-cam” by using it to show the perspective of a rampaging wild animal. During the film’s raucous climax, Raimi even includes a few clever nods to his Evil Dead trilogy, with both actors gleefully going over the top with silly, brutal gusto. The director also brings along some key collaborators from his past to keep things lively and polished. Bill Pope’s cinematography, in particular, looks as exceptional as always, and composer Danny Elfman offers up one of the most inspired and uniquely catchy scores of his career (especially during the film’s closing stages).
McAdams puts her toughness and comedic chops to equally good use here, and O’Brien is unnervingly good at playing a complete prick, but around the halfway point Send Help offers up a pivot in the wrong direction. In a bid to drag things out more than it needs to, Raimi and the writers head uneasily into Six Days, Seven Nights territory, making viewers wonder if these two might be developing Stockholm Syndrome and have feelings for each other. That’s a lot less interesting to watch, even if all of it is meant to act as a means of generating further suspense or a potential twist down the line. It never feels earned, organic, or warranted. McAdams and O’Brien are obviously better as enemies, and if they stayed that way, Send Help would be a lot tighter of a picture and about thirty minutes of filler shorter. (There’s an outstanding 85 minutes in this nearly two hour movie.)
This section of the story also offers up further evidence that the film’s heroine might be as nutty as the antagonist makes her out to be, suggesting that she’s just as ruthless as he is, but not attractive, cunning, or social enough to be successful. That thread adds some bitterness and cynicism to a film that was, for a little while anyway, a subversive bit of entertainment for a mainstream studio B-picture. I believe this is all in a bid to make the viewer think a bit harder about what they’ve just seen, but by making things more complex than necessary, some of the fun and satisfaction of all this chaos gets robbed in the process.
But think about it, I did, and overall I have to say that Send Help remains a fun time and a return to form for those who wished Raimi went back to his low and mid-budget roots. The sum of the film’s high points offset the lesser moments, muddled messaging, and lapses in general storytelling logic. Watching McAdams and O’Brien (the latter of whom has never been better than he is here) trying to one-up and harm each other is a delight no matter how it’s delivered. And despite all the blood letting, dangerous weather, and killer flora and fauna about the island, it’s still a nice distraction from the frigid winter temperatures outside the theatre.
Send Help opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, January 30, 2026.
